With technology so prevalent and portable today, many people believe the handwriting is on the wall for cursive writing. For a generation learning to communicate by typing on tiny keyboards with their thumbs, using a pen or pencil to connect letters with curly swirls that connect letters may seem quaint and outdated.

Vanessa Silver, an educator who specializes in penmanship, disagrees.

“With the onset of calculators, we still teach math,” Silver said. “Why is it with the onset of keyboards, we don’t need to learn writing? There’s a place for both. It’s not either/or.”

Silver was in San Diego on Friday and Saturday to lead a workshop on the curriculum Handwriting Without Tears for a couple of dozen teachers at the Sheraton Mission Valley.

The curriculum is one of three major penmanship curricula used in schools and differs from the other two because it teaches cursive letters that are straight up and down rather than tilted forward.

The relevance of writing became a debate topic when penmanship was left out of the new Common Core standards being implemented in public schools nationally.

In an essay written for the California Teachers Association, fourth-grade teacher Dustin Ellis from Simi Valley argued that cursive writing is as unnecessary as calligraphy.

Whatever can be created by a pen can be recreated just as artfully by a computer, Ellis wrote. Besides, he continued, cursive writing isn’t going to around in 10 years, and anything already written in it will be digitized for non-cursive readers to understand.

“I know you can download the Declaration of Independence and see it in printed form,” Silver said. “But I love the idea that generations will be able to read an important document such as that in its original format. And for myself as a mother, my sons grew up never playing with a gift until a hand-written thank-you note was sent.”

Silver also said that the skill does not have to be taught at the expensive of other skills, if done correctly.

“We are talking five minute lessons and five minutes of practice,” Silver told teachers in her workshop Saturday. “If you do that, you’ve got a penmanship program going at your school.”

As she showed her workshop students, learning handwriting can even be fun.

Lesson plans she taught included props, dances and a rap song about a “Magic C” sung by a bunny puppet coming out of a top hat.

In another lesson about how writing certain letters requires jumping from the base of a letter to its top, Silver had her class stand as she sang about a jumping frog.

“Here comes the best part,” she said, leading the workshop to follow along as she began hopping. “Jumpity, jump jump, jumpity jump jump!”